A Royal Hangover

I get asked a lot 'Why did you start drinking?

Did something terrible happen to you at fifteen?

Because terrible things do happen to

fifteen year old girls, I get that.

And the scary thing is that no,

nothing happened.

I had a really nice family.

I had amazing parents, I still do.

I had great friends.

I was never particularly confident,

I was never particularly attractive.

I was always one of the really awkward teenagers.

I just loved it.

I just felt like I fitted in my own skin,

if that makes sense.

It was such an amazing feeling.

It kind of felt like a big quilt,

like a big quilt being wrapped around you,

where you didn't worry,

where you couldn't really feel anything.

I don't know why I didn't wanna feel anything at 15...

I can't even tell you. It was like being in love.

I knew something was wrong.

Because sometimes... you know, like one of those kaleidoscopes,

where you're looking through it and everything clicks.

Sometimes, the kaleidoscope would click into place,

just for a split second, and you'd know what was wrong.

You'd know something was terribly wrong,

and you didn't know quite why it was alcohol.

But it was.

Every time the kaleidoscope clicked into place,

and all the colours made sense,

I'd go off again and there'd be an excuse to drink.

Because there's always someone drinking more.

There's always someone more messed up than you.

So it was always OK.

I've never had enough to drink.

Never in my life have I had enough to drink.

And thank god really because then I would be dead.

MUSIC

MUSIC - MOBY 'LONELY NIGHT'

MUSIC - MOBY 'LONELY NIGHT'

GUITAR

This is me.

This is actually the only photo of me holding a can of beer.

My name is Arthur Cauty,

and I am one of the few people in Britain who don't drink.

That's how it feels anyway.

That's not to say I've never tried it. I have.

I just never liked it.

Even as a teenager when all my friends where out drinking,

I always preferred to be out shooting silly films.

Making music.

Or sitting in my bedroom trying to save humanity

from the latest threat of Armageddon.

I even tried my hand at pro wrestling.

I always had something more interesting to do.

Alcohol just didn't stand a chance.

But I saw the affects of it all around me,

at home, on the streets.

Fuck off! Fuck off!

You having a lovely time?

On TV.

In the news.

Britain's got a major drinking problem...

...one in five of all deaths are caused by alcohol...

...Britain's binge drinking culture...

...binge drinking...

...binge drinking...

Forty Jaegers!

Wherever I looked, people were getting pissed.

DRUNKEN CHANTING

So why do we do it?

The British drink more than any other culture

because they can handle it.

And because we know how to have fun.

Yeah it doesn't look that fun. But maybe it's just me.

Alcohol is a potential menace to community safety

as well as to his personal health.

Absolutely, we should ban it entirely.

The only obvious thing to do is to

get rid of this scourge completely.

Well that sounds like a terrible idea.

Violence, wanton destruction and utter lawlessness...

I think we can all agree

we've built up a pretty bad reputation for ourselves

when it comes to drinking,

but this obsession with alcohol is nothing new.

It's something that has been around for hundreds of years.

For most of human history, and certainly until

the late nineteenth century,

water was basically unsafe to drink.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth century,

tea, coffee and soft drinks were all unavailable,

so you'd find that old, young and

even children were drinking beer.

They were drinking a variety of beer called small beer,

perhaps a little bit stronger than modern day Shandy.

Working men felt that it gave them health and strength.

''Beer gives you muscle''.

Men in hard physical jobs particularly

would be drinking vast amounts,

drinking up to three gallons of beer a day.

In the early eighteenth century,

gin drinking reached what people have seen

as an epidemic or a craze.

Of course it's epitomized most famously in Hogarth's Gin Lane.

Basically you could produce it and sell it

more or less anywhere.

So not only public houses sold gin,

but grocery shops and general stores also sold gin.

You could go in and buy

some basic items and have a shot of gin on the side.

They also used to sell the stuff on the streets,

people would go around selling gin

to the spectators at public executions.

And then the First World War had a big impact.

The government, and particularly the Ministry of Munitions

and later Prime Minister Lloyd George

identified drink as a real threat to the war effort.

Famously he said

'we are fighting Germany, Austria and drink,

but the greatest enemy is drink.'

In the Second World War, the Government saw drink and pubs

as essential to maintaining morale.

It was thought important to keep up a

reasonable supply of beer to the troops.

There used to be a phrase 'beer and Britannia'.

The French were identified with wine,

so the English were identified with beer.

Well, yes, rather.

In more modern times, from the nineteen fifties and sixties,

alcohol consumption continued to rise.

From the nineteen eighties it became a particular concern

the eighties associated with football hooliganism

or the 'lager lout' phenomenon.

And then in the later twentieth century,

the binge drinking phenomenon.

One of the Government's aims in the 2003 licensing act

was to try and persuade us to adopt a more

'continental style' of drinking,

where we drink sensibly as they do allegedly in French cafes,

having cultural conversations,

rather than binge drinking and falling out of pub doorways

as allegedly we are doing here.

I don't drink a lot of alcohol,

I drink sometimes once a week.

And only if I am in a restaurant.

I never drink alone, in my home or

if I am alone with my kids or family, I never drink.

We don't drink to be drunk,

we drink to appreciate the wine or the alcohol.

My opinion about the British?

The first thing I would think about them, is binge drinking.

I think they don't know what to do,

and there is no interest in their lives,

and they think that the only way to have fun is to drink.

I think the first time I had alcohol it was for my birthday

when I was thirteen, just one drink.

My daughter is fifteen and she doesn't drink alcohol.

For their birthday they have the right to

put a finger in the glass and to taste it,

normally they hate it

and I am very happy about that.

Quite famously people know that in France and Italy for example,

quite young children are allowed or encouraged

to have a bit of wine with dinner with their parents.

In the UK, young people tend to have fewer meals with adults

than in other countries

and spend more time with friends.

We tend to eat earlier in the UK

which means parents often aren't home from work.

On the continent they eat dinner later,

it sounds trivial, but it completely changes

the dynamic of the family environment.

In this country there has not been a culture

of respecting alcohol or

respecting the manufacture of alcohol

or the produce of wine or things like that,

we have never had that culture.

You can be on the continent, France, Spain for example,

and observe people in their late teens or early twenties

happily socialising over a coffee or a milkshake,

and alcohol isn't the point of purchase,

it's the social contact with each other.

Whereas it's quite unusual to find that phenomena in the UK

in the early evening, that young people would be socializing

in a non alcohol environment in that way.

We are well known as a nation of boozers.

Really in Britain there really isn't any stigma

about being seen drunk in public.

I think that's quite surprising for people from other countries.

CROWD CHEERING

In the US, I don't think you see that kind of binge drinking

public drunkenness culture in quite the same way.

There is obviously the Spring Break culture of going out

and getting absolutely wrecked for about three or four weeks.

Spring Break y'all!

But outside of Spring Break

I think they are quite a bit more disapproving